Fascist Scotland

Jealousy has always been the key to understanding Scots. Perhaps because they have always been poor relative to the English, they have a hatred of anybody richer than them. The name of Scotland's largest landowner, the Duke of Buccleuch (pronounced "baklew) is not so much uttered as spat out in most of Scotland. So they have always been very jealous of one another and that has made them very socialist.  It's only by going abroad and escaping envious eyes that Scots can prosper.

But socialism plus nationalism is the recipe for Fascism -- and Scottish nationalism is more than mere patriotism.  It has morphed  into national self-assertiveness and new and improved hatred of their Southern neighbour.  And so a form of Fascism does seem to have emerged.

The recent referendum on Scottish independence seems to have been the flash-point.  It pumped up nationalism to new heights and the failure of the referendum has left nationalists seething with anger.  And anger is of course behind most Leftist policies.  So Scotland is getting some severely Leftist policies.  And the MAJORITY of Scots who voted to stay united with England are simply not respected.  Nationalists are not accepting their defeat graciously. And since they do have control of the Scottish parliament, they can do a lot of damage.  See below.  -- JR


By Allan Massie

The smell of blood is in the Scottish air – and the nationalist daggers are out once again. No matter that they lost the referendum. SNP membership is surging, and so is the spiteful abuse of their opponents, openly branded quislings and collaborators for daring to disagree.

The nationalists are on aggressive form, set to rule not just the Scottish parliament but a majority of Scotland’s 59 Westminster seats. New polling funded by Conservative peer Lord Ashcroft has predicted a 21 per cent swing to the SNP, which would mean Labour losing 35 of their 41 seats.

If that seems like a distant issue from south of the border, then consider this: if the SNP performs as the polls suggest, an overall Labour majority in May will be almost impossible. But a Labour-SNP coalition becomes an increasingly likely scenario – and a worrying one. Because the SNP could influence the whole of the UK with what has become a divisive brand of state socialism.

Just look at what they plan in Scotland, harrying the great estates – and their owners – with taxes and forcible land sales. The nationalists even want to meddle in family life with sinister new measures promising government supervision of all Scottish children.

This might chime well in Left-wing cities such as Glasgow and Dundee, the new nationalist heartland, but many see the proposed land reform as fuelled by class envy and socialist dogma.

The SNP’s claim to a monopoly on Scottish patriotism infuriated many unionists during the referendum campaign, but its Stalinist identification of the party with the state is worrying even more.

For now, the guns have mostly fallen silent, as this is the close season for game birds and stalking, but for landowners and their employees there is a feeling that the guns are being turned on them, and that the traditional social and economic pattern of country life is in danger of being torn up.

Under the bureaucratic slogan of ‘sustainable development’, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has proposed a raft of separate measures that she believes will attract the support of the Scottish Left, and which landowners believe is a class-based attack on the great estates and centuries of tradition.

One is a plan to give rural communities the right of compulsory purchase over the land they farm – even if the landowner, whose family may have been custodians of it for generations, doesn’t want to sell it.

The SNP also want to change the inheritance laws of primogeniture that would fragment the ownership of the great estates within a few generations by ensuring the division of property among all of a landowner’s children. Then there is the removal of the tax breaks that make many estates viable and investment in them possible.

In truth, however, the country sports that the SNP so despises are all that makes many of the estates economically viable.

The party is fond of preaching that the ownership of much of the land is concentrated in comparatively few hands. Some 400 individuals or trusts (family or commercial) are said to own most of Scotland. Yet much of the country is mountain and moorland. A 500-acre chunk of arable land in, say, Berwickshire, is far more profitable than 5,000 or even 15,000 acres in the Highlands.

Jamie Williamson, laird of Alvie and Dalraddy, near Aviemore, tells me wryly that his 13,000 acres are MAMBA – ‘more and more of b***** all’.

‘We farm cows, sheep, trees and tourists,’ he adds. ‘Field sports are more important – we offer grouse-shooting and deer-stalking – because the Highlands are less favourable for agriculture.

‘The poorer the land, the more you need to live off it. Round here, that’s a minimum of 2,000 to 5,000 acres.

‘We’re faced with people who have a politically motivated agenda and don’t realise what they’re doing. It could end up like Ireland, where sub-division means that everyone has a quarter-acre potato patch. The attitude now is, “You’ve got it, we want it.” '

Lack of respect for property rights is characteristic of all socialist regimes, so it is not surprising that the SNP’s land reform will render property insecure.

Actually, Scots already have a Land Reform Act, passed in the first Scottish Parliament with little controversy. It established a statutory right to roam throughout the countryside with a few designated exceptions. That right had always existed, as trespass on private property was not an offence in Scotland unless there was damage or malicious intent.

The Act also gave a community the right to buy an estate if the owner was willing to sell, and provided public funds to make this possible. There have been a handful of buyouts, some apparently successful. In a warning to the SNP, however, others have proved far more problematic.

The 94-strong community on the beautiful Hebridean island of Gigha became the best-known beneficiaries of the legislation when they bought their seven-mile-long island from businessman Derek Holt in 2002 with £4 million of public money in the form of a grant and a loan. The population has since swollen to 160 people, but the island is reported to be £3 million in debt, and looking to the Government for further help.

Highland estates change hands frequently; the land is unproductive, country sports are labour and investment-intensive. They swallow money. It’s why any community that benefits from a buyout – whether voluntary or as part of a socialist land-grab – is likely to be going back to Holyrood soon, holding out the begging-bowl.

This isn’t true of all parts of Scotland, I should add. The fertile estates in the Borders , where I live, rarely change hands, because they are not loss-making. Estates such as those of the Duke of Buccleuch, the Marquess of Lothian and the Duke of Roxburghe make a huge contribution to the social, economic and cultural life of the region. They offer access and provide employment for tens of thousands.

It is estimated that ten per cent of Scottish jobs are in agriculture and activities related to it, such as shooting. They are generally a force for good, and for prosperity, and only a fool would want to break them up. However, that is exactly what the SNP plans.

It’s easy to see that such measures might have a rabble-rousing appeal for city-dwellers to whom the big estates are bad and the poor, embattled workers are victims.

These are also, of course, people who have no idea of how the rural economy works. It is private spite dressed up as public interest.

The final nail in the coffin of the sporting estates would be the SNP plan to remove the ‘de-rating’ tax-break brought in by the Major Government 20 years ago.

On the face of it this may seem a more justifiable change, as most businesses pay rates, but the consequences might be damaging.

Jamie Williamson is quite clear about that. His estate employs 19 people directly and as many again indirectly, while overheads are huge and the profit on field sports is meagre enough to be tipped into the red if the new taxes are too high. If that happens, many estates will abandon shooting, and with it will go the tourism and hospitality industries that rely on it.  ‘It could,’ he adds, ‘have an impact all the way down the line.’

Williamson is a landowner, a laird, so the response may be ‘he would say that, wouldn’t he?’  But his views are echoed and put even more forcibly by Alex Hogg, who is a gamekeeper, not a landowner. In fact, he’s chairman of the Scottish Gamekeepers Association.

He says: ‘Local businesses are supported by the estates and shooting brings in millions.  ‘Why would you want to drive away that investment?

‘The SNP keeps talking about public interest. But surely the public interest is served by having a thriving community that’s not subsidised. I’m dumbfounded by these proposals. The SNP has gone far-Left, and it scares me.’

Since it came into office, the SNP has weakened local democracy in favour of enforcing its own ideologically driven diktats. It has overridden, for example, local objections to wind farms. It has created a single Scottish police force, free of any local democratic control. Worse still, the SNP state has no regard for the individual.

Another SNP measure hits at the autonomy of the family. This is the Named Persons Act, which provides for the state to appoint a named guardian, usually a social worker or teacher, for every child and adolescent in Scotland.

This is, of course, dressed up as a means of providing protection for vulnerable children and young people. Who, they say, could possibly object to this?

The answer is anyone who believes parents are better judges of their children’s interests than the state or social workers. The SNP claims parents and children have asked for these guardians but, for me, the assumption is clear: parents can’t be trusted and children belong not to their parents but to the state, just as in Mao’s China.

Meanwhile the intrusion of the state into private life gathers pace.

The SNP is planning a new ‘SuperID database’, effectively a computerised Big Brother, that would store a great deal of confidential information including health details, tax payments, even whether someone is a member of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh.

This information can be shared among government bodies – including, bizarrely, Quality Meat Scotland.

Willie Rennie, leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, says: ‘This needs to be stopped. They plan to take information on people using the health service and allow access to 120 organisations.’

The East German Stasi would have loved to have a database that linked health, tax and much other private information on its citizens. It could become reality in Scotland.

And yet, despite its contempt for individuals, for families, for property rights and for liberty, the SNP is riding high in the polls. Its dream is that it will hold the balance of power at Westminster where, Sturgeon insists, they would do a deal with Labour, but on no account with the Tories.

This is rank hypocrisy. When the SNP ran a minority government between 2007 and 2011, they happily did deals with the Scottish Conservatives to get budgets through.

Actually the SNP’s intentions in Westminster are absolutely clear. They aim to make a bloody nuisance of themselves.

They hope to exasperate the English to such an extent that eventually they will tell the Scots to clear out – even though 55 per cent of us voted to remain part of the United Kingdom. As Salmond, defeated in September but hoping to return to the Commons as an MP, charmingly put it, he hopes ‘to hold England’s feet to the fire’.

There is talk in Scotland of Labour, the Tories and Liberal Democrats doing a deal to keep Salmond out, or at least encouraging voters to back the candidate most likely to beat the SNP.

If that happens, the Nationalists will surely shriek foul. But considering what they plan for the rest of us, the laugh will be on them.

SOURCE

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The Prime Minister of New Zealand gets the hypocrisy of the Left



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Perry's Claim to Fame Is Simple: Jobs

Texas is where the jobs are

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is considering another run for the White House in 2016, and his platform is strong in the primary concern of voters. As political strategist James Carville so memorably put it during Bill Clinton’s first campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

In his State of the Union, Barack Obama crowed about the jobs he created since 2010: “America has put more people back to work than Europe, Japan and all advanced economies combined. Our manufacturers have added almost 800,000 new jobs.”

But Obama didn’t give credit where it’s due. Since the start of the Great Recession in 2007, the 1.169 million increase in jobs nationwide up to December 2014 can be attributed entirely to the roaring Texas economy. The other 49 states and Washington, DC, altogether have lost about 275,000 jobs. Texas enjoyed its 51st consecutive month of growth in December, adding more that 2,000 jobs every business day. And while the nationwide headline unemployment rate stands at 5.6%, the rate in Texas dropped to 4.6%. Pretty impressive numbers for a candidate’s résumé.

Of course, Texas owes much of its boom to fracking on privately owned land. Fracking has sparked a recovery in other industries, including construction. From January to November, more building permits for single-family houses were issued in Houston alone than in all of California in the same period.

Unfortunately, some of Texas' job growth came because of crony capitalism – sweetheart tax deals and so forth. That shouldn’t play well with free-market conservatives, but the average voter probably won’t care much about that angle when Perry can say, “Yeah, but Texas under my leadership is responsible for virtually all the job growth in the nation.”

One issue that will tickle conservative heart strings is that leftists are labeling Perry a “tenther.” Like the supposedly pejorative “denier,” the Left now labels anyone who believes in the Tenth Amendment a “tenther”. We’re mighty proud to be in that club.

Interviewed by Heartland magazine, Perry said that he wants to be a strong Tenth Amendment leader, working with other governors who share his passion. “We need to get back to 50 states competing against other … to become a powerful country, a powerful economy again.” He continued, “We need to … make the states … into laboratories of innovation [again to] put America back on the road to recovery.”

A push to restore the federalism our Founders established is long overdue and we hope the next president and governors have the wisdom to restore the Tenth Amendment as we have the Second.

Meanwhile, should Perry emerge as a viable candidate, the Left will simply lie to destroy him. Lies, character assassination, mudslinging. The Left’s stock in trade.

Indeed, this is why he had a run-in last year with Travis County Democrat District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg after she was arrested for drunk driving with three times the legal limit of blood alcohol. During her arrest and booking, she behaved like a bratty eighth grader. Sentenced to 45 days, she served half. Because she heads the Public Integrity Unit of the DA’s office, Perry asked her to resign. Like any good disgraced Democrat, she refused, causing Perry to cut funding to her office until she was replaced.

Smelling blood in the water, special prosecutor Michael McCrum took the matter to a grand jury and got an indictment for two class A misdemeanors: abuse of official capacity and coercion of a public servant. Got that? Perry allegedly “abused” Lehmberg by demanding her resignation. And he “abused” the power of the veto. That’s rich.

The Leftmedia lost no time headlining: GOVERNOR INDICTED. Unfortunately, the case will drag on for months, keeping Perry’s “sullied” name in the news. He could lose campaign contributors, as ridiculous as that might seem, but Democrats have been at this game for decades, and they know their stuff. Let’s hope the voters show more sense than the media hounds.

In terms of campaigning, two things will work to Perry’s advantage this time: He’s no longer governor and can focus all his energy on the campaign, and he’s not coming off back surgery, which many think put him off his game in 2012. And, again, that job-creation résumé is going to play well in a nation sloughing along under Obamanomics.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Just another Leftist psychopathic liar

Remember Bill Clinton claiming that Hillary was named after Sir Edmund?  Problem:  Edmund Hillary was just a New Zealand sheep farmer at the time she was born. Climbing Everest came years later.  A typical psychopathic lie



Longtime residents of French Quarter say the NBC News anchor’s vivid claims about Katrina since the August 2005 hurricane have been overblown.

Williams’ past reporting has come under new scrutiny after revelations earlier this week that he had peddled a false story about what he described as a near-death experience in which a US army helicopter he was riding in in Iraq in 2003 came under RPG and AK-47 fire. The story was exposed by US soldiers as false. Williams called it a “mistake” and apologized.

Longtime residents of New Orleans’ French Quarter say they believe Williams’ vivid claims about his Katrina reporting in the years since the devastating August 2005 storm have also been overblown. They shake their heads at Williams’ having said that he saw a body floating face-down outside his hotel. They say it is highly unlikely that Williams’ hotel was “overrun with gangs”, as the anchor has said. They say there was no dysentery, a disease Williams has said that he caught while he was in the city reporting, and that bottled water was plentiful in the area – despite Williams’ claims to the contrary.

“I saw one of his tapes last night. He said he was told not to drink bottled water in front of people because people would kill you for it?” said Dr Brobson Lutz, a former director of the New Orleans city health department who is a longtime resident of the French Quarter and who ran an EMS station there after the storm. “That’s absolutely hogwash.”

SOURCE

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Fallout hits Hildabeest



There’s an emerging consensus among some political gabbers that Brian Williams’ long-running misrepresentations about his time in Iraq does serious damage to a major national figure.

The twist: The figure being skewered is not the embattled NBC anchorman but Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Why would misstatements by Williams — that a helicopter he rode in a dozen years ago in Iraq came under enemy fire — damage the once and likely future presidential candidate?

Because the former secretary of state and frontrunner-in-waiting for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination had her own Williams-esque flight of war-zone “misspeak.”

Clinton’s error came in the thick of her 2008 run for the presidency, when she claimed in a speech that she and her party once ducked sniper fire on an airport tarmac in Bosnia. It wasn’t true.

The NBC anchor’s career-threatening failure on the Iraq story now has commentators, particularly on the political right, saying Clinton should be in just as much trouble.

At least one seasoned hand in Clintonworld theorizes, though, that Hillary’s 2008 campaign trail plotz will not ultimately be as damaging as Williams’ meltdown. Here’s why: Williams has told the tale of the attack on a U.S. military helicopter many times over the years since he embedded with the Army during the 2003 Iraqi invasion. His problem is that he has expanded and embellished the alleged brush with danger many times.

According to reporting led by the military journal Stars & Stripes, aviators on the scene at the time said the copter carrying Williams was an hour behind another Chinook forced to land, after being hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.

In multiple retellings over the years, though, the NBC anchor has gone from saying he was “on the ground” when he learned about the RPG threat to suggesting the copter immediately in front of his took the hit to saying his own chopper was battered by both the RPG and AK-47 fire.

Williams told Stars & Stripes he “misremembered” the incident and that he doesn’t “know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another.” An on-air apology Wednesday night has done little to quell the furor.

Flashing back a couple of campaign seasons, NBC News was among the outlets that hit hardest when Hillary Clinton got her own war story wrong. Though Williams was on the periphery of that reporting, his network reported Clinton’s flub and how it took her a week to correct it.

When first learning of Williams’ own veracity problem this week, one former Clinton aide said he was “chagrined,” thinking, “This will bring back something from that campaign, and those parallels will be drawn as if what she did was exactly like what Brian Williams did.”

Clinton had said during a March 2008 speech that, while visiting Bosnia in 1996 as first lady, she remembered “landing under sniper fire.” A greeting ceremony had to be cancelled, she said, as her party “ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”

Videotape instead showed Clinton, her daughter Chelsea and their entourage simply striding across a tarmac with smiles and greeting a retinue of well-wishers.

SOURCE

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The Big Unemployment Lie

The U.S. economy added 257,000 jobs in January, but the headline unemployment rate rose one-tenth of a point to 5.7%. The broader measure, known as the U-6 rate, also climbed from 11.2% to 11.3%. That’s mixed good news, since slight growth in record-low labor participation likely caused the rate spike. Even when we create jobs in the Obama economy, we seem to lose ground.

One of the problems is that each month’s jobs report pushes the same fraudulent narrative embraced by Barack Obama’s administration since before his re-election. To hear Obama tell it, the country’s current unemployment rate is pretty much back to where it was before the Great Recession. Therefore, the economy is on the mend, and we have the Great One’s policies to thank for it.

None of this is true.

The so-called official unemployment rate that is recorded and made public by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is known as the U-3 rate, but it doesn’t provide the full jobs picture for the country. The U-3 number records only those people who are currently out of work, not receiving any employment income and actively seeking new employment.

Yet there is an alarmingly vast swath of people who aren’t counted in these “official” unemployment numbers. Skilled laborers who have been out of work for a sustained period of time who earn at least $20 in a week are not considered unemployed under U-3. Nor are people working part-time but seeking full-time work to support their families.

Jim Clifford, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, wrote this week, “The official unemployment rate, which cruelly overlooks the suffering of the long-term and often permanently unemployed as well as the depressingly underemployed, amounts to a Big Lie.”

In fact, the unemployment rate “goes down” when more people leave the workforce than continue looking for work. So the worse reality gets, the better the headlines can be.

If we want a true sense of the unemployment picture, we should focus on the U-6 rate. This unemployment figure is publicly available, though it never receives the fanfare or public scrutiny that the U-3 number does. Indeed, one has to dig for the U-6 number; the Obama administration would never deliberately bring it up in a press release or a news conference. The U-6 rate is a look at real unemployment – not just those who are out of work, but also those who’ve been out of work so long that they’re no longer counted in the U-3 report.

That’s why we note the U-6 rate every month.

The underemployment picture is even worse. This group, including those mentioned above who are working but not at the level they should be based on skill or economic need, is 15.9%. If you adhere to Gallup’s definition of a good job as 30-plus hours per week with a regular paycheck, then only 44% of the eligible adult population is working full-time. (Stay-at-home moms and certain others aren’t counted in the working population, but 44% is still a shockingly low rate in a supposedly healthy economy.)

Politicians in Washington can’t seem to understand why unemployment is down and people just aren’t “feeling it.” Well, they’re not feeling it because most of them aren’t seeing it. Regardless of the rosy picture that the White House paints with its misleading data, Clifton notes, “Right now, as many as 30 million Americans are either out of work or severely underemployed. Trust me, the vast majority of them aren’t throwing parties to toast ‘falling’ unemployment.”

If we continue to gloss over this very real jobs problem, we can’t create the conditions that are necessary for a real economic recovery.

Dictators and leftists often embrace the old saw that if a lie is repeated often enough, it becomes reality. Such is the case with our “official” unemployment rate. The White House embraces it for the sake of political expediency. The Leftmedia embrace it because they love to report good news when there’s a Democrat in the White House. Wall Street embraces it because they want investors to keep buying stocks. And so, the rest of the country is led to believe that all is well and getting better.

The time has come to face the facts as they exist, not as the Leftmedia want us to see them.

SOURCE

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Obama Wants to Remove Funding for Veterans!

We receive emails on a daily basis calling us racists for opposing Obama. The President’s race and skin color has absolutely NOTHING to do with it. Here’s an example of why we oppose this man’s Presidency:

This past August, Obama signed the Veterans Choice Program into law, allowing military veterans to seek medical assistance outside the VA instead of waiting on endless lines. It set aside $10 Billion to pay for veterans’ medical care outside the VA.

We praised the President and Congress for getting the ball rolling and fixing at least some of the problems plaguing the VA for years.

Well, yesterday Obama sent his proposed budget to Congress for consideration. And guess what… he wants to DEFUND this important program!

As I said, this legislation was signed into law last August. It passed through the GOP-held House of Representatives and then the Democrat-controlled Senate. This was bipartisan legislation the American people DEMANDED.

And now, Obama wants to let the Department of Veterans Affairs to raid this $10 billion fund and allocate this money towards programs that only seem to fail our vets!

I will confess that in the past, I have held off from placing the blame where it was due. I have been desperately trying to convince myself that Obama’s policies were the result of his weakness or stupidity. I think that many of his decisions still are. I didn’t want to believe that the President of the United States was doing these things on purpose.

But this is undeniable. For the President to submit a budget that dismantles an entire program for serving veterans is unacceptable. That wasn’t an accident… Obama and his staffers deliberately chose to dismantle this crucial aid program.

When I find out about treachery like this, it immediately gives me pause. I understand that this makes it easy to become discouraged. All in all, we sent close to 100,000 faxes to Congress demanding that they alleviate the fatal wait times at VA hospitals. And it worked. We helped get legislation signed into law.

But now, just 6 months after this law was passed, the President wants to cannibalize it to fund other failing VA policies. He touted this program as a success in August but now apparently it is too successful for his liking.

If anything, this is just more proof of how Barack H. Obama doesn’t care about our veterans. How else do you explain the President signing this into law and then wanting to defund it a few months later?

We fought so hard to reform the VA and get our veterans the medical care they deserve outside the VA hospital system. Now, Obama wants to throw these veterans back into a failed system so they can die while waiting months to be seen by a doctor!

SOURCE

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What French McDonald’s Restaurants Tell Us About the Pros and Cons of a Minimum Wage Hike

President Obama said in a YouTube interview last month that he wanted to focus, during his last two years as president on helping people get ahead.

“In particular, how can I make sure that folks who are working hard…cannot just survive, but how can they thrive? How can they get ahead?” Obama said.

Many think the answer to helping Americans thrive and get ahead is to increase the minimum wage—and Obama has often talked about his support for hiking it. But it’s a mistake to think hiking the minimum wage will help.

In fact, a hiked minimum wage could harm people, not help them thrive.

The Heritage Foundation’s James Sherk says  that raising wages would have a particular impact on the fast food industry, where many low skilled and young workers get their start in a journey to better and higher paying jobs.  Sherk states that by raising worker wages, “many fast-food restaurants would respond by restructuring dramatically in order to use less labor.” In other words, there would be fewer jobs as a result of the mandated higher wages—and fewer opportunities for low-skilled and young-workers to be employed.

The president only has to look at McDonald’s restaurants in France to see the impact a higher minimum wage would have. France’s minimum wage is $10.60 an hour. Not surprisingly, every McDonald’s has resorted to using touch screen ordering rather than workers. It simply doesn’t make sense, when minimum wage starts that high, to employ people when machines can do the job.

This is reality. When faced with high operating costs, corporations such as McDonald’s will find ways to cut costs, whether by substituting technology for labor or forgoing improvements and investments in the company’s future.

Ultimately passing a minimum wage hike would provide fewer, not more, opportunities to Americans. If Obama wants to see all Americans thrive, he should make sure they have as many opportunities to do so as possible—and stop promoting a minimum wage hike.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Conservatives have a better sense of humor

This is an article from a few years back but it reinforces much that I have been saying for many years.  And it is in the NYT!

We begin by asking you to rate, on a scale of 1 (not funny at all) to 9 (hilarious) the following three attempts at humor:

A) Jake is about to chip onto the green at his local golf course when a long funeral procession passes by. He stops in midswing, doffs his cap, closes his eyes and bows in prayer. His playing companion is deeply impressed. “That’s the most thoughtful and touching thing I’ve ever seen,” he says. Jake replies, “Yeah, well, we were married 35 years.”

B) I think there should be something in science called the “reindeer effect.” I don’t know what it would be, but I think it’d be good to hear someone say, “Gentlemen, what we have here is a terrifying example of the reindeer effect.”

C) If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins the most? I’d say Flippy, wouldn’t you? You’d be wrong, though. It’s Hambone.

Those were some of the jokes rated by nearly 300 people in Boston in a recent study. (You can rate some of the others at TierneyLab, nytimes.com/tierneylab.) The researchers picked out a variety of jokes — good, bad, conventional, absurdist — to look for differences in reactions between self-described liberals and conservatives.

They expected conservatives to like traditional jokes, like the one about the golfing widower, that reinforce racial and gender stereotypes. And because liberals had previously been reported to be more flexible and open to new ideas, the researchers expected them to get a bigger laugh out of unconventional humor, like Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts” about the reindeer effect and Hambone.

Indeed, the conservatives did rate the traditional golf and marriage jokes as significantly funnier than the liberals did. But they also gave higher ratings to the absurdist “Deep Thoughts.” In fact, they enjoyed all kinds of humor more.

“I was surprised,” said Dan Ariely, a psychologist at Duke University, who collaborated on the study with Elisabeth Malin, a student at Mount Holyoke College. “Conservatives are supposed to be more rigid and less sophisticated, but they liked even the more complex humor.”

Do conservatives have more fun? Should liberals start describing themselves as humor-challenged? To investigate these questions, we need to delve into the science of humor (not a funny enterprise), starting with two basic kinds of humor identified in the 1980s by Willibald Ruch, a psychologist who now teaches at the University of Zurich.

The first category is incongruity-resolution humor, or INC-RES in humor jargon. It covers traditional jokes and cartoons in which the incongruity of the punch line (the husband who misses his wife’s funeral) can be resolved by other information (he’s playing golf). You can clearly get the joke, and it often reinforces stereotypes (the golf-obsessed husband).

Dr. Ruch and other researchers reported that this humor, with its orderly structure and reinforcement of stereotypes, appealed most to conservatives who shunned ambiguity and complicated new ideas, and who were more repressed and conformist than liberals.

The second category, nonsense humor, covers many “Far Side” cartoons, Monty Python sketches and “Deep Thoughts.” The punch line’s incongruity isn’t neatly resolved — you’re left to enjoy the ambiguity and absurdity of the reindeer effect or Hambone’s affection for dolphins. This humor was reported to appeal to liberals because of their “openness to ideas” and their tendency to “seek new experiences.”

But then why didn’t the liberals in the Boston experiment like the nonsense humor of “Deep Thoughts” as much as the conservatives did? One possible explanation is that conservatives’ rigidity mattered less than another aspect of their personality. Rod Martin, the author of “The Psychology of Humor,” said the results of the Boston study might reflect another trait that has been shown to correlate with a taste for jokes: cheerfulness.

“Conservatives tend to be happier than liberals in general,” said Dr. Martin, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario. “A conservative outlook rationalizes social inequality, accepting the world as it is, and making it less of a threat to one’s well-being, whereas a liberal outlook leads to dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and a sense that things need to change before one can be really happy.”

Another possible explanation is that conservatives, or at least the ones in Boston, really aren’t the stiffs they’re made out to be by social scientists. When these scientists analyze conservatives, they can sound like Victorians describing headhunters in Borneo. They try to be objective, but it’s an alien culture.

The studies hailing liberals’ nonconformity and “openness to ideas” have been done by social scientists working in a culture that’s remarkably homogenous politically. Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one on social science and humanities faculties, according to studies by Daniel Klein, an economist at George Mason University. If you’re a professor who truly “seeks new experiences,” try going into a faculty club today and passing out McCain-Palin buttons.

Could it be that the image of conservatives as humorless, dogmatic neurotics is based more on political bias than sound social science? Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who reviews the evidence of cognitive differences in his 2005 book, “Expert Political Judgment,” said that while there were valid differences, “liberals and conservatives are roughly equally closed-minded in dealing with dissonant real-world evidence.”

So perhaps conservatives don’t have a monopoly on humorless dogmatism. Maybe the stereotype of the dour, rigid conservative has more to do with social scientists’ groupthink and wariness of outsiders — which, come to think of it, resembles the herding behavior of certain hoofed animals. Ladies and gentlemen, what we have here is a terrifying example of the reindeer effect.

SOURCE

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Obama Versus America

By Thomas Sowell

In his recent trip to India, President Obama repeated a long-standing pattern of his – denigrating the United States to foreign audiences. He said that he had been discriminated against because of his skin color in America, a country in which there is, even now, “terrible poverty.”

Make no mistake about it, there is no society of human beings in which there are no rotten people. But for a President of the United States to be smearing America in a foreign country, whose track record is far worse, is both irresponsible and immature.

Years after the last lynching of blacks took place in the Jim Crow South, India’s own government was still publishing annual statistics on atrocities against the untouchables, including fatal atrocities. The June 2003 issue of “National Geographic” magazine had a chilling article on the continuing atrocities against untouchables in India in the 21st century.

Nothing that happened to Barack Obama when he was attending a posh private school in Hawaii, or elite academic institutions on the mainland, was in the same league with the appalling treatment of untouchables in India. And what Obama called “terrible poverty” in America would be called prosperity in India.

The history of the human race has not always been a pretty picture, regardless of what part of the world you look at, and regardless of whatever color of the rainbow the people have been.

If you want to spend your life nursing grievances, you will never run out of grievances to nurse, regardless of what color your skin is. If some people cannot be rotten to you because of your race, they will find some other reason to be rotten to you.

The question is whether you want to deal with such episodes at the time when they occur or whether you want to nurse your grievances for years, and look for opportunities for “payback” against other people for what somebody else did. Much that has been said and done by both President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder suggests that they are in payback mode.

Both have repeatedly jumped into local law enforcement issues, far from Washington, and turned them into racial issues, long before the facts came out. These two men – neither of whom grew up in a ghetto – have been quick to play the role of defenders of the ghetto, even when that meant defending the kinds of hoodlums who can make life a living hell for decent people in black ghettos.

Far from benefitting ghetto blacks, the vision presented by the Obama administration, and the policies growing out of that vision, have a track record of counterproductive results on both sides of the Atlantic – that is, among low-income whites in England as well as low-income blacks in the United States.

In both countries, children from low-income immigrant families do far better in schools than the native-born, low-income children. Moreover, low-income immigrant groups rise out of poverty far more readily than low-income natives.

The January 31st issue of the distinguished British magazine “The Economist” reports that the children of African refugees from Somalia do far better in school than low-income British children in general. “Somali immigrants,” it reports, “insist that their children turn up for extra lessons at weekends.” These are “well-ordered children” and their parents understand that education “is their ticket out of poverty.”

Contrast that with the Obama administration’s threatening schools with federal action if they do not reduce their disciplining of black males for misbehavior.

Despite whatever political benefit or personal satisfaction that may give Barack Obama and Eric Holder, reducing the sanctions against misbehavior in school virtually guarantees that classroom disorder will make the teaching of other black students far less effective, if not impossible.

For black children whose best ticket out of poverty is education, that is a lifelong tragedy, even if it is a political bonanza to politicians who claim to be their friends and defenders.

The biggest advantage that the children of low-income immigrants have over the children of native-born, low-income families is that low-income immigrants have not been saturated for generations with the rhetoric of victimhood and hopelessness, spread by people like Obama, Holder and their counterparts overseas.

SOURCE

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Obama is Just Doing a Jim Dandy Job!

By Rich Kozlovich

While 54% of voters want no new taxes and more budget cuts, President Obama is expected to propose a near $4 trillion federal budget that includes tax and spending increases. However, 16% actually do favor a federal budget that increases spending and 21% think we should continue spending like drunken sailors at the same level. Only that would “be an insult to drunken sailors – at least they’re spending their own money”.

So now we absolutely know one thing from that poll - we have 37% of the American population that never took arithmetic in school. Is possible that reading, writing and arithmetic isn't taught in American schools any longer?

Rasmussen polls show society isn’t all that thrilled with their health care and don’t expect Obamacare to fix it. Furthermore they think society is better off without government interference in the nation’s health care system. All these things Americans don't like are foundational to everything Obama is doing and yet Rasmussen’s Daily Presidential Tracking Poll gives Obama a 51% performance approval rating. Does that make sense to anyone?

I don’t really know if Rasmussen can be trusted any more than other pollsters, but I put pollsters as a whole in the same category as snake oil salesmen. They ask questions in ways that will generate affirmation versus reality. Having said that - I've followed the Rasmussen polls for some time now and I keep seeing a majority who claim they dislike Obama's policies and yet think he's just doing a Jim Dandy job. Is that rational? Is that a case of cognitive dissonance or was Gruber right – people are stupid?  The second question we need clarity on is  this - if so many people are stupid, did they get that way on their own?

I think it’s a combination of the following. An American educational system that's turned into an expensive failure, cognitive dissonance is rampant, the pollsters are corrupt, people are largely misinformed and uninformed by choice, a corrupt media wants to keep them that way - and Gruber was right. There is only one question I think needs to be answered. Since Gruber was attacked as ‘arrogant’ by various writers – we need to clearly define in our minds if he was being arrogant or was he merely making an observation of reality that no one liked?

Here’s an insight to the correct answer. Newsweek gave a test to 1000 people and found that 29% of Americans didn’t know who the Vice President was, 27% didn’t know the President of the U.S. was in charge of the executive branch and 70% didn’t know the supreme law of the land was the U.S. Constitution. One commenter made the observation that perhaps they thought it was the Prime Directive from the United Federation of Planets. I would be willing to bet if that question was part of the test a fair number would have agreed – and believed it! Is that an indication the American educational system has failed to teach history and civics?

Apparently 33% don’t know the official date for the signing of the Declaration of Independence was July 4, 1776. Hummmm, I wonder if they go around asking why July 4th is a national holiday. Oh wait….I know….I know…..it’s a national holiday created to lend economic support to fireworks manufacturers…Right?

But that’s only a third of the population, perhaps I’m just being picky since 65% didn’t know the Constitution was written by the Founding Fathers at the Constitutional Convention – that’s 65%, - and only 12% could name one of the writers, 43% didn’t know the first ten amendments to the Constitution is called the Bill of Rights and 63% didn’t know there were nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. Now, perhaps I'm just being picky again, but is this another indictment of American education?

Now for those who are snickering– how many amendments are there to the U.S. Constitution? Answer without looking it up!

Eighty percent didn’t know who the President of the U.S. was during WWI and 40% didn’t know the U.S. was fighting Germany, Italy and Japan during WWII, with a full 73% being unaware the “cold war” was over the spread of communism. Now does all of this give anyone the impression that someone in American education is clearly dropping the ball?  Is it any wonder why so many believe "going green" is good, in spite of the fact the green movement has been responsbible for more death and suffering than the socialist monsters of the 20th century.

And 51% believe Obama, who increased the national debt from a little over ten trillion dollars to a little over eighteen trillion dollars in six years without having much of an impact of the "Great Recession", is just doing a Jim Dandy job!

Have a really good day!

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Why we should cut Russia some slack

I admire the Russian people.  They suffer a generally dreadful climate and have almost always had atrocious government.  Yet through all that they have not only  survived but have made great contributions to human civilization.  One only has to mention the names of Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky to know how much of our classical music we owe to Russians.  And there are other notable Russian composers too:  Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Gliere, Borodin, Mussorgsky Scriabin, Glazunov, Prokofiev etc.  The list goes on.

And in literature we think of Tolstoy, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Turgenev, Pasternak, Nabokov, Gorky etc.  Perhaps because of limits imposed by their climate, Russians are great readers.

And in science and technology too Russians have much to their credit.  Sikorsky invented the helicopter as we know it today; the first earth satellite was Russian, and Russia's military industries are legendary.  If there were a war tomorrow, the absurd F35 fighter would be rapidly blasted out of the sky by the latest products of the Mikoyan and Sukhoi design bureaux.  Multi-role aircraft rarely perform any role well and the F35 is an extreme example of that. It is a political compromise and is as good as you would expect from that.

And I admire the Russian people for not losing their patriotism.  Most of the Western intelligentsia have lost theirs under Leftist influence but not even Communism could suppress Russian patriotism.  Despite the theoretical internationalism of Communism,  Stalin in fact had to name what we call WWII as "The great patriotic war" in order to get maximum support from the Russian people.  Patriots stand ready to support and defend their own people.  It is only nationalists who want to subdue other people.

So why has the Western world declared a new Cold War on Russia?  Because of typical Leftist meddling in other people's affairs. Ukraine is in the midst of a civil war. America has had a couple of those too so can hardly criticize. Ukraine is a botch of a country and the war is an attempt to remedy that.  Ukrainians dislike Russians greatly -- about as passionately as Scots loathe the English.  And the "United" Kingdom went within a hairsbreadth of breaking up over that just last year.  So the Russians of Ukraine want to get out from under a Ukrainian majority who despise them and, sadly, war is usually needed for that.

And Mr Putin is cautiously supporting Ukraine's Russians.  No Russian leader would do less, given Russian patriotism. The West should encourage  the independence movement in Eastern Ukraine, not condemn it.  Didn't America have a war of independence once?  So why aren't Americans sympathetic to the independence desires of others?

The cold war is hurting the great Russian people and it should cease at once.  While King Obama has been doing all he can to reduce American military preparedness, Mr. Putin has been steadily rebuilding his forces.  In the face of Western hostility he is well positioned to turn the cold war hot.  What if he decided to invade one or all of the Baltic states, with withdrawal being conditional on an end to the cold war and a large sum of monetary assistance as reparations for the damage to Russia's economy?

The West could do nothing militarily.  The USAF would not dare to deploy the F35 in its present bungled state, leaving only the ageing F22 Raptor to face the startling performance of the latest Russian military aircraft.  So Russian air superiority in the Baltic would be established from the start.  American aviators would get as rude a shock as they did in WWII when encountering Japan's Mitsubishi Zero fighter.

And no Western military would have the stomach for a fight with Russia anyway.  All that the Western militaries are good for these days for is to take on moronic Middle-Easterners  -- and they have had little success even at that.  Ever since Vietnam, the American army has lost all its wars.  There have been some battlefield successes but no lasting victories. Iraq, for instance, is now arguably more hostile to the West overall than it was under Saddam.  There would surely be enough warning in that to preclude a hot war with Russia.  Russia could do to American forces what it did to Napoleon and Hitler.

And there are substantial Russian populations in the Baltic States so Mr Putin could well declare that he was on another rescue mission.  Russians would rally to the cause.  It would take a very large sum indeed to buy the withdrawal of Russian troops under  those circumstances.  Yet the West would feel obliged to rescue the heroic people of the Baltic states from a war brought on by Western folly -- so would pay the Danegeld.  Western taxpayers would feel the pain resulting from the folly of their leaders.  The world desperately needs a leader who is a man of peace at the moment.

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Life isn't fair

This 4 year old has the sort of looks that most adult women could only dream of



But here's the challenging bit.  This girl will retain most of those looks into her early adulthood.

How do I know that?  Because her mother did.

Life isn't fair.  Wise people deal with that.  Foolish people whine about it

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Regulations Have Consequences

The article below by Daniel Greenfield was written 5 years ago but it is an exceptionally clear  analysis of its subject

It is part of the basic theory of government that when the regulators try to regulate the regulated, the regulated will in turn try to control the terms of their regulation by attempting to influence the regulators. In other words, that which government controls, will try to control it. Because regulation is a two way street. By regulating people, countries and industries-- you are entering into a relationship with that which you regulate.

To rule over the unrepresented creates an unstable situation. And so the regulated will either attempt to indirectly or directly influence the regulators, overthrow them or escape their control. This too is an inevitable outgrowth of the basic theory of government, one which liberals tend to deliberately ignore when complaining about corporate lobbying. Corporate lobbying and donations to both parties are a direct product of the growth of government regulation, interference in industries, bailouts, grants and other forms of corporate welfare. The more government interacts positively or negatively with business, the more business lobbyists will try to influence how those interactions go.

There is of course one easy way to end most corporate influence on politics. But it is not one that the very people agitating against corporate money in politics will champion. That is because it requires them to give up power. Corporations are motivated to spend money in the hopes of either earning a profit or avoiding a loss. Spending money on lobbying would dry up if there were no profits or losses to be gained from doing so. But the very politicians who wail about corporate money, still expect those donations to keep coming in. And they continue exercising power over entire industries and fields, which naturally summon the companies dealing in them to try to shape how that power is exercised.

What has the expanding network of government regulations wrought? First, it has created a vast industry of lobbyists from companies who either want to avoid regulation or want to exploit regulation in order to benefit themselves or harm their competitors. Companies who want the government to pass along taxpayer money to them or create monopolies for their benefit. Companies who want government contracts for items that the government doesn't need or doesn't need to buy at that price, but will anyway because companies find it cheaper to donate to congressmen than compete fairly for the contract. All this is the result of a system in which government regulations have made it increasingly entangled with the very businesses that government is regulating.

Secondly, it has convinced many companies that it is simply easier to opt out, and move their manufacturing facilities out of the control. This has been a boon for China, but a disaster for America. The manufacturing sectors of America have become depressed, and perfect fodder for Democratic politicians to bring home the dole by taxing America's remaining businesses. But as Thatcher once reputedly said, "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." In America, if the process goes on, there will be two types of companies, government subsidized companies and companies that have relocated overseas. And America will finally have Europe's economy with everyone on the dole, including the companies themselves.

As government continues to press companies over overseas revenue, they will find it simpler to relocate their headquarters overseas. Some have already done it. This will deprive the system of another source of taxable revenue, which will only drive them to press down harder on the existing sources. Which will further accelerate the entire process. But the people behind it know exactly what they're doing.

The combination of regulation and taxation makes it gradually too expensive for companies to operate legitimately. That means the only possible way for them to continue operating is to either leave the country, or throw in with the system and get a grant to begin doing something absolutely useless. Under socialism, rent seeking behavior by a company is much safer than making a good product and selling it. And so the successful business strategy now relies on integrating business with government, to produce a socialist state, in which business is not simply regulated by government, but is an actual part of government.

Consider a system in which Cap and Trade can allow speculators hiding behind environmentalist credentials to rob existing companies of billions of dollars, and decimate entire industries-- through government regulation. Under such a system it makes no sense to own a factory. Instead it makes sense to visibly drive a Prius while flying a private jet around the country, talk about the shrinking icebergs while eating imported lobster, and lobbying for wealth redistribution from actual productive companies.

That is the socialist strategy. Not to destroy business. But to destroy legitimate and productive business. Business that does not rely on government for its moneymaking strategy. And in the end all that remains is a whitemarket economy that is tightly regulated, low priced, inaccessible and virtually useless for obtaining many basic products and services-- and a blackmarket economy that is unregulated, overpriced and where anything can be found. That doesn't just apply to the kind of health care system that the left would like to impose on America. That is the kind of system they want to impose comprehensively in every area of life, minus of course the blackmarket, which is of course an inevitable outgrowth of overregulation.

Regulation is inimical to economic diversity. The more you regulate a field, the less authentic economic diversity it can have, because economic diversity is a function of economic creativity and mobility. Regulation leads to central planning in the long run, and to a freeze on economic creativity in the short run. The more regulation you have, the less economic diversity remains and the economic ecosystem rewards only business strategies that are symbiotic or parasitic on government. Regulation steadily makes the government the key, and then eventually the only player in the marketplace, as it comes to control everything from manufacturing to the sale of the products all down the line.

The growing influence of corporate money on politics is not a sign of capitalism, but of socialism. Capitalism does not require buying politicians. Socialism does. And the influence of corporate money on politics parallels exactly the influence that politicians have on business. It is a two way street, and those that the regulators regulate will attempt to influence the regulators. The more this happens, the more it's a sign that there are too many regulations, not too few.

Regulators like to believe that they can absolutely control human behavior. But human beings respond in unexpected ways. And one of those ways is that they will strive to escape or seek to control, those who would control them. Democracy is the outgrowth of the practical recognition that the rule of the people is also the best way to maintain a civil and working society. It avoids the power struggle between the government and the governed. By trying to rule without representation, the power struggle resumes. Because regulations have consequences. And the first consequence of regulation is that those you rule over, will try to rule over you.

Via Rich Kozlovich

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AG Nominee Lynch's Claim Illegals Have 'Right' to Work in U.S. 'Just Absolutely Crazy'

Speaking about Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch’s statement that illegal aliens have the “right to work” in the United States, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) said he was “astounded” by Lynch’s comments, calling them “crazy” and “just not true.”
CNSNews.com asked Vitter, “Do illegal aliens have the right to work in the United States?”

“No, they do not, and more importantly, the law is very clear on the fact that they do not have the right to work in the United States,” Vitter answered.

“Ms. Lynch basically said illegal aliens have the same right to work in the United States as citizens and green card holders, which is just absolutely crazy and just not true. The law is very clear on that. And for her to say that is just…I was absolutely astounded.”

During her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lynch asserted that illegal aliens living in the United States shared the same right to work as U.S. citizens and legal residents.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) asked Lynch during the hearing, “Who has more right to a job in this country" – citizens and legal permanent residents or illegal aliens?

“I believe that the right and the obligation to work is one that's shared by everyone in this country regardless of how they came here,” Lynch responded.

CNSNews.com asked Vitter, “Do you believe Ms. Lynch’s comments reflect what the president believes about illegal aliens in the United States?”

“Absolutely, Ms. Lynch’s comments obviously reflect the president’s stance on immigration, and it’s clear she supports his position on it,” he responded.

“It’s a deciding factor for me,” Vitter continued. “I said weeks ago that I would vote against Ms. Lynch being confirmed as attorney general, specifically because of this issue. The fact that she would say something that is so contrary to U.S. law tells me she should not be the next attorney general.”

Vitter also said he was not surprised Lynch’s support for illegal aliens’ “right to work” in the United States did not get much airtime in the mainstream media last week.

“It doesn’t surprise me,” Vitter explained, adding that “the mainstream media has a history of not covering things or reporting things that are critical of the president’s agenda, and clearly it’s no different with this issue.”

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Are Republicans more open to new product choices?

The authors below were clearly embarrassed by their findings.  They wanted to find out that Leftists were more adventurous.  So they offer some contorted reasoning to  explain why it was conservatives who were more adventurous.

They need not have worried, however.  What generalizability do findings have that are based on the responses of convenient groups of American college undergraduates?  Non-existent sampling gives non-existent generalizability.

As it happens, I looked at the question some time ago, using proper sampling of the general population.  And I used both measures of general sensation seeking and consumer sensation seeking. And I found the opposite to the report below!  How I interpreted my findings may however be rather uncongenial to Leftists.  I headed my article as:  "Political radicals as sensation seekers"

And I think that fits.  Conservatives are the contented people and Leftists are the restless, dissatisfied  ones.  The journal article summarized below  is "Political conservatism and variety-seeking"

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Some people may think of political conservatives as having a desire to maintain traditions, but a new study shows they also have a more adventurous side that seeks out variety in products.

The new research from the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University was recently posted online by the Journal of Consumer Psychology. It includes three experiments in which political conservatives prove they are more likely to choose a variety of consumer products than their liberal counterparts.

"Although political conservatives have been found in previous studies to have a higher desire for control, they have an even stronger motivation to follow social norms when there is no threat to the system or individual," explains Naomi Mandel, professor in the W. P. Carey School of Business, one of the study authors. "Since we have a very individualistic culture in the United States and Europe, people tend to think of others more favorably when they include more variety in their consumption choices. Therefore, political conservatives may seek out that approval and positive evaluation."

In a series of experiments, Mandel and her co-author - Daniel Fernandes, assistant professor of the Catholic University of Portugal - found political conservatives wanted more variety in their products than liberals.

For example, the researchers first used several established scales to question and determine the political leanings of 192 college undergraduates. Then, they told the students to imagine four consecutive weekly grocery shopping trips during which they could select from four brands of snack chips. Overwhelmingly, the politically conservative students chose more variety in their chips for the month than the more liberal students did.

In another experiment, 111 undergrads were polled for their political leanings. Then, they completed other tasks before ultimately being asked to select three candy bars from five options as a reward for participating. Again, the political conservatives exhibited much more variety in the candy bars chosen.

"Differences between liberals and conservatives are rooted in basic personality dispositions that reflect and reinforce differences in fundamental psychological needs and motives," says Mandel. "We wanted to understand how and why a consumer's political ideology could affect his or her consumption choices."

SOURCE

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Greek leeches

By economic historian Martin Hutchinson

"We are not worried. Our team is strong. We have Icarus in the wings" chortled Greek leftist Alexis Tsipras after his election victory. You'd think a Greek would remember that Icarus fell to a watery grave when his wings melted – the country's education system is clearly not what it was. All the same, apart from a few cheap laughs, it's worth reflecting what his victory will bring both Greece and the rest of Europe.

Greece has been a problem for the EU ever since it joined in 1981. The 1980s prime minister Andreas Papandreou was both highly corrupt and thoroughly anti-Western, and developed considerable skill in sucking subsidies and special deals for both Greece and his cronies out of the Brussels bureaucracy. (At that time Greece was both small and much poorer than any other EU member, so playing to the liberal conscience in Brussels generally worked well – it was only taxpayers' money, after all.)

By 2008, buoyed by EU subsidies, Greece had achieved a per capita GDP of $32,000. That was higher than all of central Europe and about three times the level of its neighbors Bulgaria, Macedonia and Romania, all of which had been capitalist for a couple of decades by then and were considerably better run.

As an indication of how badly Greece was run even before Tsipras won last week's election, you can look at the ratings for the country by Transparency International, the Heritage Foundation and the World Bank, which between them cover the gamut of political/economic belief in the West. On Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, Greece ranked 69th in 2014, equal with Bulgaria and Romania and below Macedonia. That's actually a 10-place improvement over 2010 – center-right prime minister Georgios Samaras had some genuine if modest progress to his credit. Heritage International's 2015 Index of Economic Freedom ranked Greece an appalling 130th, hugely below its Balkan neighbors, all of which ranked in the 50s. Finally, even the World Bank's left-friendly 2015 Ease of Doing Business ranking put Greece at #61 compared with Bulgaria, Macedonia and Romania at #38, #30 and #48 respectively.

Given those ratings, prepared by agencies varying in their worldviews, it's clear that Greece's purchasing power gross national income per capita, recorded by the World Bank at $25,700 in 2013, is still far too high compared with its fellow EU members Bulgaria at $15,200, Romania at $18,400, or better-run non-member Macedonia at $11,500. History has repeatedly shown that there is a limit on the living standards that can be achieved in kleptocratic states, in which there are few returns for legitimate innovation and business capability and massive rewards for insider dealing and corruption. Greece has since 1981 managed to suck resources out of its richer neighbors to raise living standards artificially far above that limit. Tsipras intends to demand a redoubling of that resource transfer; he must be resisted.

Tsipras is right that it is impossible to achieve through government cuts the further austerity needed to get Greek living standards to their appropriate level. The necessary adjustment must instead be achieved by Greece leaving the euro and allowing its currency to float downwards. Northern European taxpayers have been supporting this mess since 1981. Tsipras' election, against a government that was at least modestly improving Greece's position, means that it is time for them to stop doing so.

Tsipras has promised to increase tax compliance, as well as restoring many of the cuts in social programs that were made in the last few years. However, tax increases have already been tried by the previous government; while raising the tax to GDP ratio four percentage points to 33% from 2009 to 2012 that ratio appears to have topped out at that level and to be unable to rise further. Given Syriza's hostile attitude to private wealth, it's likely that tax flight will soar following their election and that Greek tax compliance, already abominable, will fall to hitherto unimagined levels.

After four years of grinding austerity, Greece is currently running a "primary surplus" on its budget. However this is a spurious statistic, much loved by spendthrift Brazilians; it actually means the country is running a massive deficit when interest on its huge debt is factored in. Given the likelihood of capital flight (which after all is a big problem in Russia, which ranked far above Greece on the Heritage survey and immediately below it on the World Bank one) tax collection is likely to decline rather than increase. Needless to say, one would be mad indeed to start a small business under a Syriza government. So a Greek debt crisis appears unavoidable, even with a helpful degree of laxity among the EU's paymasters.

Giving in to Tsipras would be bad news indeed for the euro's future and indeed for that of the EU. Spain's Podemos, which professes the same mad-left belief system as Tsipras' Syriza, would be immensely strengthened, probably sufficiently so as to win the next Spanish election, due later this year. Italy's feeble attempts at reform would halt altogether, as the innumerable special interests in that country would see a chance to preserve their privileges by leeching off northern European taxpayers. France would probably tip over into the ranks of the leechers from the shrinking group of northern European resource generators.

In such circumstances, the euro would be doomed. It's one thing to decree in an academic vacuum that a common currency requires income transfers from the richer states of Europe to the poorer; it's quite another to require such transfers in hard cash from the honest burghers of Munich, Amsterdam and Helsinki to prop up Tsipras and his corrupt leftist looters. Redistribution schemes are generally of pretty dubious morality. In this case the doubtful morality would be plain for all to see, and revulsion to it would be infinitely reinforced by a rebirth of nationalism, in itself healthy but devastatingly bad for trans-national projects such as the euro.

The other alternative would be to throw Greece out of the euro, which should have been done five years ago. It would probably not be necessary to throw Greece out of the EU; there are now enough corrupt ineptly-run Balkan members of the EU (with more to come) that Greece's approach to life sticks out less among the EU's other members than it did in 1981.

In 2010 it was disclosed that Greece was nowhere near fulfilling the Maastricht Criteria for euro membership and never had been and that its 2001 entry into the euro had been accomplished through accounting fraud abetted by Goldman Sachs. Rather than propping Greece up with huge subsidies and a debt renegotiation, on promises of better behavior in the future, the EU authorities should have realized that behavior sufficiently better as to solve Greece's problems was most unlikely to occur, and would cause huge political damage if it was attempted. Had Greece been thrown out of the euro in 2010, its necessary decline in living standards would have been imposed by devaluation of the "new drachma" rather than by the EU or its own government, and so much less political damage would have been caused.

If Greece were to exit the euro now, its currency the "new drachma" would decline rapidly to 50-60% of its previous value, as Greek living standards were brought in line with those of its neighbors in Bulgaria, Romania and Macedonia. Following this move, Greek small businesses would find their possibilities immeasurably increased and exporters would thrive, while imports became very expensive indeed for the Greek population. Of course, with Tsipras in power the benefits of this devaluation would almost certainly be absorbed in state bloat and yet further corruption, so that Greek living standards would decline yet further, but that's what the silly people voted for; they deserve it.

Meanwhile, the euro itself would be immeasurably strengthened, as the other weak sisters, seeing the decline in Greek living standards, would redouble their own efforts at public sector austerity. Provided Podemos was defeated in Spain later this year (which would be more likely to happen, since Syriza's success had led not to further handouts but to Greek impoverishment) both Spain and Italy should be able to right their economies with only modest additional effort. The recent revulsion against profligacy in France suggests that there, too, a Greek sacrifice should produce sufficient improvement.

This strengthening of the euro would not remove the political difficulties of the EU, notably the blatant expansionism of its monstrous bureaucracy, but it would provide the great majority of Europeans with a better, more disciplined future than would be available through more handouts. It would at least allow the euro to stagger on towards the next crisis, rather than collapsing as would be the inevitable end-result of a Greek bailout.

"Beware of Greeks bearing gifts" (Timeo Daneos et dona ferentes) wrote Vergil in the Aeneid two thousand years ago. The EU hasn't seen many gifts from Greece since 1981; instead there has been a steady procession of Greeks demanding gifts, ever more urgently.  It's time for the handouts to stop.

Via email

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When the levy breaks? NM legislator proposes eliminating almost all taxes

Calling New Mexico’s tax system “a mess,” a state senator proposes a plan to eliminate most levies in the Land of Enchantment.

“It’s difficult, it’s confusing, and it’s certainly not fair or simple,” State Sen. William Sharer, R-Farmington, said during a news conference Wednesday.

Brandishing a copy of the state’s 1,089-page tax code, Sharer claimed New Mexico could eliminate almost every tax currently levied by reforming the way it collects the gross receipts tax.

“No personal income tax, no corporate income tax, no compensating tax, no vehicle excise tax, no insurance premium tax and about a hundred other taxes go away,” Sharer said.

The GRT would stay, but would be reduced to 2 percent. Currently the state GRT is 5.125 percent, and additional taxes in counties and cities raises the rate in some municipalities to as high as 8.6875 percent.

Sharer cited a study by Lee Reynis at the University of New Mexico Bureau of Business and Economic Research that found a 2 percent GRT would generate more revenue than existing taxes do, provided that all exemptions, deductions and credits were eliminated from the GRT.

Currently, Sharer said, there are more than 300 exemptions, deductions and credits. If these were eliminated, the GRT would be sufficient to pay all the expenses of the state and local governments at current funding levels, without any cuts in spending.

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Will magnetic media create a black hole in the history of late 20th century creativity?

Apologies for that portentous heading but it does express a fear I have.  Let me explain.  Magnetic media came into their own during the late 20th century.  First there were open reel tape-recorders for sound; then there cassette tapes for sound; then there were floppy disks for computer software, including games; then there were VHS video recorders for a full audio-visual experience.  But all those are now obsolete.  They were an advance for their times but have now been superseded by DVDs etc.

None of that would be any great problem except for one thing:  Magnetic media degrade over time.  That was recently brought home to me when I got out one of my old VCRs and set it up to play some video tapes of two Mozart operas that had been recorded about a quarter of a century ago.  They were a professional production so should have been of good quality.  Unfortunately they were only good in parts, as the curate said.  At their best they reproduced about as well as a DVD but in other parts there was a lot of flicker, "snow" etc.  And it was not the player that was at fault.  More recent recordings were fine.

Yet the performances were good ones that deserved to be preserved.  And, probably because they were great works by a very famous composer, they ARE now available on DVD (See here and here).  But what of less famous works by less famous composers and performers? They must be on the brink of being lost forever.  I think that is a great pity.  Hopefully, all of the best of late 20th century creativity will be transferred to optical format before it is too late but I am pessimistic about most of it.

Interestingly, not all old audio-visual technology is so fragile.  Sound and vision recorded on movie film is pretty long lasting, as is music recorded on the old black vinyl LPs.

Hard disks are also of course magnetic media but disk failure is frequent enough for most people to keep backups of everything -- so data on them is less likely to be irretrievably lost.  I back up my more recent files onto DVDs several times a year.

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Want to Defeat Terrorism? It’s Time to Go to the Source

by Michael Ledeen

Lots of well-known former foreign policy/national security officials don’t, or feel obliged to appear “realistic” (diplospeak for “don’t do anything, keep talking”).  Some former military officers do, although only up to a point.

Three duly respected policy professionals, Denis Ross (Obama’s — and plenty of others’ — Middle East guru for a few years early on), Eric Edelman (Bush’s under secretary of defense and earlier ambassador to Turkey), and Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations (who recently published a very important story detailing the background of the Iranian occupation of the US Embassy in Tehran in ’79), tell us it’s time to get tougher with Iran:

"[It's] time to acknowledge that we need a revamped coercive strategy, one that threatens what the Islamic Republic values the most—its influence in the Middle East and its standing at home."

In other words, threaten the regime itself and its foreign legions in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen.  But just when you say to yourself, “Finally!  They’re going to call for regime change,” they tiptoe delicately into dipspeak:  “Iranian officials must come to understand that there will be no further concessions to reach an accord and that time is running out for negotiations.”
Further down, they return to the “we’re almost, kinda for regime change” theme:

"the United States should consider a political warfare campaign against Tehran to complement its economic sanctions policy. The administration officials and its broadcast services should draw attention to the unsavory nature of the theocratic regime and repressive behavior. Such language will not just showcase our values but potentially inspire political dissent."

As if the Iranian people needed the State Department and the appeasers at the feckless Persian service of the Voice of America to tear the blinders from their eyes and enable seem to see that they are living in misery under a hateful regime!  If you really want to “inspire political dissent,” just do it.  Call for the release of the opposition leaders, support the students’ and workers’ and women’s movements, and call for a national referendum on the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic.

But the three gurus aren’t calling for that.  They have no apparent interest in real political warfare, except as part of the nuclear negotiations. They’re calling for some sort of military action in Syria and Iraq, not as a decisive blow to the expansionist activities of the Islamic Republic, but as an essential ingredient in the parlay with Zarif and Rouhani.  Their main objective is to compel the Tehran regime to come to terms on the nuclear deal.

"A regime stressed at home and under pressure abroad may yet consider the price of its nuclear intransigence".

That won’t do, I’m afraid, because, as the Washington Post said in 2012, to get an end to the Iranian nuclear project, you have to have regime change in Tehran.  To be sure, the destruction of the Assad regime would be a major step in that direction, but the three gurus don’t even mention that;  nor, for that matter, does the exemplary General Robert Scales, although he has a better grasp of the dynamics of the Middle East war.

Scales, albeit using different language, stresses the importance of defeating the jihadis on the ground, in large part because defeat undermines their messianic world-view.  He calls it depriving the enemy of “hope,” I call it a blow to their conviction that their bloody enterprise is blessed by Allah.  It comes to the same thing:

"Think of hope as a material formed in a crucible over time by a series of successful terrorist strikes against the West and Western-affiliated countries in the Middle East. Since violent actions filled this crucible, only a violent military counterresponse can crack the crucible and empty it of hope. The object of a campaign against hope is not necessarily to kill in large numbers but rather to find the greatest vulnerability and shatter it dramatically and decisively.

The terrorist’s greatest source of hope today comes from Islamic State battlefield successes in Syria and Iraq. A defeat there cracks the crucible. The question is how to do it with enough drama and speed that terrorists the world over lose hope and become passive. From any perspective, the Islamic State enclave in Syria is militarily unassailable. But Iraq is a different story."

I certainly agree with the general’s main point — defeat of the enemy is very important, and when we defeat them it is not just a gain of terrain but also an ideological and political victory for our side — I think his context is too narrow, and I don’t share either his pessimism on Syria or his surprising optimism regarding Iraq.

I remain perplexed at the failure of our policy elite to advocate all-out political and military support for the Kurds.  They are pro-Western, they are tough and brave, and their enemies in the region are ours: above all, Iran, Turkey and Syria.  They are the most effective force against ISIS.  Our failure to do more for them is yet further evidence of Obama’s grotesque alliance with the Iranians, from Syria and Iraq all the way down to Yemen.

In like manner, I don’t get the optimism about Iraq, which is effectively at the mercy of Iran, and therefore a totally unreliable force.

Why not go to the source, as my late boss General Alexander Haig loved to intone?  Tehran is the source.  Unmentioned by Scales, pigeonholed by the three gurus as a negotiating challenge rather than the terror master of the world, its defeat should be the West’s central mission.

 SOURCE

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As usual, the Leftist response to criticism is attack, not thought

The latest from Britain, where the Labour Party is led by Ed Miliband, the hard-Left son of a prominent Marxist theoretician (Leftists love theory; the facts not so much).  He has become increasingly unpopular and even party members have questioned his leadership.  But let any outsider criticize him and  ...

Labour went to war with Boots yesterday after the chemist chain warned of catastrophe if the party won the general election.  Stefano Pessina, the firm’s acting boss, said Ed Miliband’s policies were ‘not helpful for business and not helpful for the country’.



Labour business spokesman Chuka Umunna hit back with a series of extraordinary attacks on Mr Pessina and his firm, which has 70,000 UK workers.  He questioned whether Boots paid enough tax while fellow Labour MPs said they would not listen to a multi-millionaire who lived in ‘a big mansion’.

The extreme response will fuel claims that the party is anti-business and raise further doubts over Mr Miliband’s election strategy.  The reaction also showed ‘staggering immaturity’ on the part of the Labour leadership, according to a former party adviser. As chaos in the Labour ranks escalated:

*    Miliband allies were said to be plotting a way to keep him in place, even if Labour lose the election;

*   The editor of the left-wing New Statesman said the leader had a ‘haunted’ look and even shadow chancellor Ed Balls had ‘all but given up’ on him;

*   The party’s biggest private donor attacked Mr Miliband’s NHS and mansion tax policies;

*    Lord Mandelson was accused of plotting to destabilise Mr Miliband;

*   The party’s election campaign chief Douglas Alexander repeatedly refused to rule out a deal with Scottish nationalists in the event of a hung parliament.

Labour’s uneasy relationship with business exploded into the open thanks to the intervention of Mr Pessina, who heads Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc, owner of the biggest chain of UK chemists.

It is highly unusual for captains of industry to be so outspoken this close to an election.

But Mr Miliband has announced a series of policies taking aim at what he calls capitalist ‘predators’ across a range of industries from energy suppliers to private landlords.

Mr Pessina said: ‘If they acted as they speak, it would be a catastrophe. The problem is, would they act that way or not? One thing is to threaten and to shout, but it is completely different to be in charge and to manage the country day to day.’

Labour has previously had close links with Boots – former health secretary Patricia Hewitt worked for it as an adviser.

But last night Labour MPs tweeted criticisms of Mr Pessina, a 73-year-old Italian who is estimated to have a £7.5billion fortune. Ilford South MP Mike Gapes wrote: ‘Does Boots boss own a big mansion in UK? Does he pay income tax in UK? Does he vote in UK?’

Mr Umunna said: ‘It is important that the voice of business is heard during this general election campaign, not least on Europe.  'But the British people and British businesses will draw their own conclusions when those who don’t live here, don’t pay tax in this country and lead firms that reportedly avoid making a fair contribution in what they pay purport to know what is in Britain’s best interests.’

But former Labour adviser Dan Hodges said attacking Boots was a ‘mad, pitch-to-the-Greens and the left’ strategy, adding: ‘The immaturity that surrounds Labour’s political decision-making is simply staggering.’

John Mills, Labour’s biggest individual donor, said reports he had criticised Mr Miliband were ‘pure mischief-making’ but went on to raise doubts about key policies.

A spokesman for Walgreens Boots Alliance insisted Mr Pessina’s comments had been taken out of context, adding: ‘He is not campaigning against Ed Miliband or Labour.’

The company has been accused of trying to cut its UK tax bill by moving its HQ to Switzerland.

The firm’s spokesman said it was now paying more tax than it had as a listed company.

 SOURCE

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UK: Socialized medicine at work

If you are seriously ill, British government doctors often just want to kill you as not being worth their time.  The evil "Liverpool pathway" -- where they bombed the elderly out with morphine and then let them die of thirst -- now seems to be gone but the underlying attitude remains



A father who doctors ‘gave up’ on following a stroke is now recovering after The Mail on Sunday highlighted his plight.

Doctors applied four times to place a ‘do not resuscitate’ order on the medical notes of Paul Scoble, 48, after he suffered the devastating stroke last August.

It meant they would not have tried to restart his heart if he had gone into cardiac arrest, and would have left him to die.

He was immobile, breathing through a ventilator and largely unable to communicate. Doctors at Basildon Hospital in Essex told Mr Scoble’s children, Danielle and Leon, to prepare for the worst and asked them to ‘seriously consider’ what their father’s life would be like if he did survive, the siblings said.

Besides suffering the stroke, Mr Scoble also had two leaky heart valves. The doctors resisted the idea of carrying out an operation to mend them and said the chances of him surviving it were slim. But Danielle and Leon refused to listen and contacted bosses at other hospitals to ask if they would operate.

After The Mail on Sunday highlighted their plight in November, medics at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London agreed to operate and he was transferred there.

Now, Mr Scoble, who runs a family import business with Danielle and Leon, is off a ventilator, eating and talking.

Last night he said: ‘I feel very lucky to be here and I owe my life to my family, friends, The Mail on Sunday and everyone at the Royal Brompton.

‘I am very disappointed at what happened to me at Basildon Hospital and what they put my family through, and I am quite shocked about how far this had to go before I could get the help I needed.’

Danielle, 29, said: ‘He is doing brilliantly – a million times better than how he was in Basildon. He is ever so grateful. He feels so lucky to have got out of there and had this operation.’

 SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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